Hamza Alavi

Karachi, Pakistan

1955–88

Hamza Alavi was born to a middle-class family in Karachi in 1921. As a child, he often encountered students who were supported by his family’s philanthropy and educational trusts. These interactions galvanized his socialist views. Alavi received an undergraduate degree from Bombay University and a master’s degree in economics from Aligarh University. After the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, Alavi played an important role in launching the Bank of Pakistan, where he held senior positions as the Secretary of the Central Board and one of five principal officers at the bank. However, he wanted to return to academia and, as a result, he left the bank and migrated to Tanzania – the birthplace of his wife, Khatoun – where he conducted research on the lives of the peasantry.

In 1955 Alavi began a PhD at the London School of Economics, where he wrote about Pakistan’s banking system. He also broadened his interests in history, politics and sociology, particularly around themes of inequality and the experiences of the agrarian classes.

Against the backdrop of racial and class inequalities in Britain, as well as the military coup of Ayub Khan in Pakistan, Alavi’s political activism and his socialist ideologies became further entrenched. He connected with Pakistanis in London who, like him, resisted the dictatorship in Pakistan and were appalled by the degrading ways in which immigrant workers and students in Britain were treated. He organized various groups for people to discuss their views, most notably the Pakistan Youth League, where young socialists and liberals received talks from prominent thinkers such as Tony Benn and Eric Hobsbawm. He also ran Pakistani welfare associations to support migrant Pakistani labourers. In 1963 Alavi published a newsletter on Pakistanis in London with the Institute of Race Relations, which highlighted the growing rate of Pakistani migration, the work people engaged in and the organizations they were part of to support their settlement, including the Pakistani Caterers Association, which had 800 members, the East London Mosque and the Islamic Cultural Centre in Regent’s Park.

Alavi, along with David Pitt, co-founded the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (CARD) in 1965, and became the organization’s Vice-Chair. The founding of CARD, which aimed to secure legislation to protect the rights of racialized minority groups, was inspired by a meeting with the civil rights activist Martin Luther King, which Alavi and other prominent anti-racist activists were invited to. He was also on the committee for the National Committee for Commonwealth Immigrants (NCCI). Alavi withdrew his membership of the Labour Party in the 1960s in response to Harold Wilson’s Labour government’s failure to adequately address racism and discrimination.

As a writer, Alavi contributed to several British publications, including the New Left Review and the Socialist Register. His contributions were notable in shaping ideas about neocolonialism, labour and production. He also created and edited the journal Pakistan Today, which offered analyses on the military dictatorship in Pakistan. The journal was active between 1957 and 1962.

In 1966 Alavi secured an academic position at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. Here, he undertook his most notable research on peasant societies in Pakistan. In 1972 he undertook a lectureship in politics at the University of Leeds, where the department was headed by his friend, the Marxist sociologist Ralph Miliband. In 1977 he became a reader in sociology at the University of Manchester, where his friend, the sociologist Teodor Shanin, was also undertaking research on the peasantry. In 1988 Alavi retired from his role at the University of Manchester and subsequently undertook various academic positions in the US, including a professorship at the University of Denver. He remained on the editorial boards for the Journal of Contemporary Asia and the Journal of Peasant Studies for several decades.

In 1997 Alavi returned to Karachi. He died on 1 December 2003.